#and it is going *great*

[cordspaghetti]

really factual recounting with no embellishments whatsoever

[flame-shadow]

hey did you know??? that if you stop stretching and maintaining mobility in your body then it goes away?? things get tight and you can't move the way that you used to??? and when you decide to try getting a stretch routine going that the first week fucking sucks because you keep going 'damn i used to be able to do this no problem' and then you have to switch gears and be kind to yourself and just focus on getting better from here instead of berating yourself for dropping the good habits in the first place??? and your body never stops aging so you gotta keep taking care of it and sometimes you gotta take care of it extra in certain areas because of things that happened when you were younger and it's boring and sometimes hurts but it's so necessary???

i am yelling this at myself right now i am going through An Experience (trying to get into a routine of body maintenance again for my physical and mental health)

[valtsv]

really wish i'd figured this out sooner but refusing to capitulate to someone who you know from repeat experience is determined not to respect you whether they understand you or not really is one of the greatest experiences in the world because there is Nothing they can do about it that matters if you refuse to play along and trying to comprehend that is physically painful for them. you get to watch the light go out of their eyes in real time as the cracks begin to form in the tinted glass through which they see the world. power word kill your ego.

[daisywords]

One of my biggest nitpicks in fiction concerns the feeding of babies. Mothers dying during/shortly after childbirth or the baby being separated form the mother shortly after birth is pretty common in fiction. It is/was also common enough in real life, which is why I think a lot of writers/readers don't think too hard about this. however. Historically, the only reason the vast majority of babies survived being separated from their mother was because there was at least one other woman around to breastfeed them. Before modern formula, yes, people did use other substitutes, but they were rarely, if ever, nutritionally sufficient.

Newborns can't eat adult food. They can't really survive on animal milk. If your story takes place in a world before/without formula, a baby separated from its mother is going to either be nursed by someone else, or starve.

It doesn't have to be a huge plot point, but idk at least don't explicitly describe the situation as excluding the possibility of a wetnurse. "The father or the great grandmother or the neighbor man or the older sibling took and raised the baby completely alone in a cave for a year." Nope. That baby is dead I'm sorry. "The baby was kidnapped shortly after birth by a wizard and hidden away in a secret tower" um quick question was the wizard lactating? "The mother refused to see or touch her child after birth so the baby was left to the care of the ailing grandfather" the grandfather who made the necessary arrangements with women in the neighborhood, right? right? OR THAT GREAT OFFENDER "A newborn baby was left on the doorstep and they brought it in and took care of it no issues" What Are You Going to Feed That Baby. Hello?

Like. It's not impossible, but arrangements are going to have to be made. There are some logistics.

[fcbalding]

poc athlete supporting each other this olympics we love to see it

[so-many-ocs]

"why does writing take so long" because 60% of it is coming up with a sentence, realizing that sentence doesn't work the way you want it to, and staring at a wall

[kind-of-a-shitty-wizard]

making ur pfp a pictue of ur favorite guy is great. the modern equivalent of some guy in the 50s pulling out his wallet and there being a picture of his wife inside and him sighing fondly at it

[mcapriglione-art]

what do you want!!!!!!!!

[lonepower]

yes i Am paying real money to make you all look at our new dog. we've had her for 3 hours and if anything happened to her I'd kill everyone in this room and then myself. her name is Tater Tot

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

the fact that shakespeare was a playwright is sometimes so funny to me. just the concept of the "greatest writer of the English language" being a random 450-year-old entertainer, a 16th cent pop cultural sensation (thanks in large part to puns & dirty jokes & verbiage & a long-running appeal to commoners). and his work was made to be watched not read, but in the classroom teachers just hand us his scripts and say "that's literature"

just...imagine it's 2450 A.D. and English Lit students are regularly going into 100k debt writing postdoc theses on The Simpsons screenplays. the original animation hasn't even been preserved, it's literally just scripts and the occasional SDH subtitles.txt. they've been republished more times than the Bible

[poisonpercy]

Gotta be honest, the popularity of blond Percy thanks to the pjo show is driving me insane because every time I see pjo fanart, I have a crisis over what little blond boy is being depicted

[reasonsforhope]

If you're feeling anxious or depressed about the climate and want to do something to help right now, from your bed, for free...

Start helping with citizen science projects

What's a citizen science project? Basically, it's crowdsourced science. In this case, crowdsourced climate science, that you can help with!

You don't need qualifications or any training besides the slideshow at the start of a project. There are a lot of things that humans can do way better than machines can, even with only minimal training, that are vital to science - especially digitizing records and building searchable databases

Like labeling trees in aerial photos so that scientists have better datasets to use for restoration.

Or counting cells in fossilized plants to track the impacts of climate change.

Or digitizing old atmospheric data to help scientists track the warming effects of El Niño.

Or counting penguins to help scientists better protect them.

Those are all on one of the most prominent citizen science platforms, called Zooniverse, but there are a ton of others, too.

Oh, and btw, you don't have to worry about messing up, because several people see each image. Studies show that if you pool the opinions of however many regular people (different by field), it matches the accuracy rate of a trained scientist in the field.

--

I spent a lot of time doing this when I was really badly injured and housebound, and it was so good for me to be able to HELP and DO SOMETHING, even when I was in too much pain to leave my bed. So if you are chronically ill/disabled/for whatever reason can't participate or volunteer for things in person, I highly highly recommend.

Next time you wish you could do something - anything - to help

Remember that actually, you can. And help with some science.

[roach-works]

pokemon theory i just thought of: new pokemon appear in the pokemon universe when they're designed in this one. they're created ex nilho but they have retroactive realness; they weren't here yesterday, but today they've always existed.

pokemon researchers have had to suss this out on their own over decades, and it's a really unpopular theory, made worse by the fact that no one can come up with a better one. from their perspective pokemon generate spontaneously but in both chronological directions, and the similarities of many pokemon seem to be detived from a conscious and creative understanding of the world--their world, though? what other world could there be?. there are ice cream pokemon and pokeball pokemon and sword pokemon and trash bag pokemon.

there are so many pokemon with both wings and a beak. is this like swords? is there an ur-flying type that this class evokes? there are so many canine pokemon. but what is a canine? is there such a thing? there's only one set of sword pokemon, right. one tea-set line. is *feline* a coherent category? would the ur-feline have two legs or four? why do so many pokemon have humanlike bodyplans-- but then again, why so few?

pichu has always been the prior form of pikachu. why didn't it get counted in order? why do we call it that instead of saying pikachu is the middle evolution of the pichu line? why can so many trainers remember finding this out well into their journeys? why didn't ash start with one?

this is why pokemon researchers do a lot of labwork, drink heavily, and use ten year olds for field research. you can't have an existential crisis if you don't even know what time is yet.

[sher-ee]

Rise up people! Vote BLUE.

[shoomlah]

My first 3D model, made after playing Riven (1997):

and my latest, made for Riven (2024):

[solmesia]

the mosquitos sure are big around here